Keep the Halloween spirit alive with novels set in sinister spaces.

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Why do stories set in haunted houses get under our skin so much? There’s an amazing sense of dread that can emerge from the narrative revelation that a house—ostensibly the source of shelter and a sense of home—has a more malicious agenda. (The same can be true for other buildings that occupy a similar function in our lives: charge somewhere familiar and stable with unruly and menacing aspects, and you have a recipe for a harrowing narrative.)

This can take many forms in fiction, from the mounting sense of the uncanny that amasses in novels like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw to the surreal threat in the likes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Kathryn Davis’s Hell. (Those seeking a look at the nonfictional roots of haunted places would do well to check out Colin Dickey’s excellent Ghostland.) Here’s a look at seven novels that grapple with places that are somehow wrong, either through restless spirits or through something less overtly supernatural, but no less scary.

Featured Image: Sheridan Butler/Alamy Stock Photo

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TOBIAS CARROLL is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. His writing has been published by Bookforum, Men’s Journal, Tin House, Hazlitt, and Rolling Stone. He is the author of the collection Transitory and the novel Reel. He’s on Twitter at @TobiasCarroll.